Slowly piecing together an ASUS ESC4000 G2 box and I'm going to attempt to pair it with an older Nvidia Tesla S1070 unit that has updated GPUs... Needless to say I have no idea what I am doing other than seeing if it will work.
ASUS ESC4000 G2 box: about $350 from eBay after replacing mobo
two Intel Xeon E5-2660 V1 CPUs: about $200 from ebay
32gb DDR3 ECC RAM: $80 from ebay
Got this to finally post last week. The ESC4000 was bought knowing it had some issues but it was cheap for its capabilities for GPU compute. Bought a spare board for $150 paid about $200 for the box it self.
It's about $70 for 1U heat sinks and the ESC4000 didn't come with the top cover so the idea of restoring the forced air cooling is a bit out of the question. I have a swamp of spare water cooling parts so I may supplement those jet turbine fans and go for a water cooling and alternative fan set up which actually would help as this machine is LOUD.
Bought the Tesla S1070 node for $150 from Ebay. Came with the interface cards and cables along with four old Tesla T10 cards(GTX280 equivalent compute cards) but those are only relevant today as space heaters. Swapping them out with GTX960's just to see if it still would work. who knows...
This machine may get similar treatment as the ESC4000 as an open case with external fan cooling to keep noise to a minimum. I only have three 960's so I will be keeping my eye out for another used one but will probably supplement it with an old GTX465 I have laying around.
The ESC4000 has convenient removable racks for the PCIe cards. Here are the PCIe interface cards for the tesla unit.
Those are some nice looking PCIe "riser" cables... Not exactly but that's the idea behind the whole Tesla S1070 is to expand PCIe externally from the system it's connected too.
I dunno how all of this craziness will turn out but I will do my best to keep this thread updated.
